Though it suffers at times from more information than insights, this is a timely study of a country still much in the news.
A comprehensive history of Ethiopia, from a diplomat and former staffer at the National Security Council, that is particularly instructive in covering the last 20 years.
Beginning with a brief prehistoric overview, Henze goes on to describe the rise of Ethiopia: an ancient civilization, the source of coffee, and one of the most developed and long-lasting empires in Africa. The Aksumite Empire that evolved on the lush Ethiopian highlands was known to the Greeks and the Romans, and its legendary Queen Sheba traveled to Israel to meet with King Solomon (a meeting that produced the first king of the Solomonic dynasty that ended only with the death of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974). A Persian prophet writing in the third century A.D.described Ethiopia as one of the great kingdoms of the age, and later scholars believed it to be the mysterious Christian empire ruled by Prester John. Henze details the turbulent years that followed the decline of Aksum, the devout adherence to Orthodox Christianity, the failed efforts of Portuguese adventurers to gain a foothold, and the great battle of Adwa in 1898. There the Emperor Menelik (who had begun modernizing what was and still is in some areas a medieval country) decisively defeated an Italian army bent on securing Ethiopia as a colony. Henze offers a persuasive and nuanced portrait of Haile Selassie, who did much to move Ethiopia forward (particularly in the 1960s, which Henze regards as a golden era for Ethiopia). But by 1974 Selassie was old, the succession not clear, and, unable to deal with a fractious country, Selassie was forcibly removed by the brutal and bloodthirsty warlord Mengistu Haile Mariam. His rule led to Ethiopia becoming a war-torn pawn in the Cold War, subject to the worst excesses of Marxism—forced collectivization, untold deaths, and a devastated economy.
Though it suffers at times from more information than insights, this is a timely study of a country still much in the news.Pub Date: July 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-22719-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
